Occurring in this way, the patient’s omission is neither accidental nor meaningless, and not even unimportant, for it betrays the visitor’s attitude to the physician. He belongs to that large class who seek those in high places, and wish to be dazzled and intimidated. Perhaps he had made enquiries by telephone at what time he would be most likely to gain admittance and had been expecting to find a crowd of applicants in a queue, as if at the grocer’s in war-time. Then he is shown into an empty room which, moreover, is most modestly furnished, and he is dumbfounded. He must somehow make the physician atone for the superfluous respect he had been prepared to show him; and so he omits to close the doors between the waiting- and the consulting-rooms. He intends this to mean: “Pooh! there is no one here and I daresay there won’t be, however long I stay!” He would behave during the interview in an uncivil and supercilious manner, too, if his presumption were not curbed at the outset by a sharp reminder. In the analysis of this little symptomatic act you find nothing that is not already known to you; namely, the conclusion that it is no accident but has in it motive, meaning, and intention; that it belongs to a mental context which can be specified; and that it provides a small indication of a more important mental process. But above all it implies that the process thus indicated is not known to the consciousness of the person who carries it out; for not one of the patients who left the two doors open would have admitted that he wished to show any depreciation of me by his neglect. Many of them could probably recall a sense of disappointment on entering the empty waiting-room, but the connection between this impression and the succeeding symptomatic act certainly remained outside their consciousness. Now let us place this little analysis of a symptomatic act by the side of an observation made on a patient. I will choose one which is fresh in my memory, and also because it can be described in comparatively few words. A certain amount of detail is indispensable for any such account.